


proof that we were two

by pseudocitrus



Series: proof that we were two [1]
Category: Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo Ghoul:re
Genre: (cuz of the bite), Bathing/Washing, Blood, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Kakuhou As An Erogenous Zone, Sex exploration, newlyweds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2018-12-14 09:05:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11779884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: Short fluffs on newly married Kaneki and Touka \o/ (And other fics close to those chapters.) Overall rated T, with explicit chapters marked as such. Includes:* Kaneki bringing books underground* Their second time* Touka returning the marriage bite* Bathing~





	1. Books

**Author's Note:**

> i can't believe our ship made it :')
> 
> hope you're having a good day!

One day, Kaneki raps gently on the bar's of Touka's room and, when she looks up at him, he holds up a small plastic bag.

“Good evening,” Kaneki says, shyly.

“Hey,” Touka replies, carefully shoving a calendar underneath her pillow. “What’s up?”

“I…um…have a present for you. Presents,” he amends, sitting beside her when Touka sits up to make space for him.

He gives her the bag, which contains a handful of books and magazines.

“I noticed you read the same things over and over,” Kaneki says. “So…I don’t know…maybe…”

“This is great,” Touka confirms. “Thanks.”

She sees his face color, a little. “No problem.”

She starts to rifle through them. It’s high-brow stuff, the stuff she often saw him toting into Anteiku, or reading slowly aloud to Hinami. Short stories, poetry. Touka starts to read a poem and finishes and then rereads it and then looks at it a little longer and Kaneki laughs, nervously.

“Sorry…if you don’t really like it, I can get something else.”

“It’s not that.” How to explain? She rubs her thumb across the side of the page.

“I’ve read a lot of stuff like this,” she admits finally.

Back when the only way to touch him was by cracking open a book. Back when the only way to hold him was by carrying more and more novels beneath Yomo’s silent gaze to :re’s bookshelves. she sorted them by which ones she thought he would like more. She dog-eared the pages of certain passages and pieces that she thought he might favor, as if there was ever a possibility that she might ever discuss them with him. Presently, she strokes a stanza. She feels his warmth beside her.

“Oh,” he says. “You have?” His eyes brighten, instantly. She finds herself smiling, despite a sudden queasiness that she stabilizes herself against with a hand on her stomach. She feigns a yawn.

“I’m tired,” she announces, lying down on the cot. “Why don’t you read me some?”

“Okay,” Kaneki says quickly. he shifts around as she gets settled, so that they are still touching. “Um…do have any requests?”

“Just read me your favorite one,” she says, closing her eyes. He starts, and —

Perhaps it’s only because she’s read this piece before. but somehow — his recitation feels so familiar. Like a sound she’s like heard often before. Like the solid thunk that followed when she slotted a books into :re’s brimming shelves, filling them, completing them.


	2. Sleeping Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's no comfortable way to convert this into like something that looks nice and proper so i'm gonna leave it the way i posted it on tumblr, lol.

_After the wedding, once the tunnels are quiet, Kaneki goes to escort Touka back to her cot._

_He then starts to hang around the entrance to the cell, like he doesn’t want to say goodnight, like he doesn’t want to leave her. In short, like he thinks he is leaving her, for some reason._

 

**TOUKA**

> “Are you…not sleeping with me?”

**KANEKI**

> “O-oh —”

 

_His blush is deep enough to show through the paint on his face._

 

**KANEKI**

> “I mean — is it — alright? I mean — if you want to want to sleep together, then of course I — of course I would want to.”

 

_Touka pauses to gather herself._

 

**TOUKA**

> “Kaneki.”

 

_She finds she has to take another moment to gather herself._

 

**TOUKA**

> “We are married.”

 

**KANEKI**

> “OH. THAT’S RIGHT”


	3. Second Time (Plainly)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an hc of the second time they do it :eyes emoji:

Touka waits a long time for Kaneki to come back to her “room,” not just to say hello or smile messily or sit beside her or read or hold her hand, though, all of those things are nice too, it’s just…at least occasionally…

“Kaneki.” In the end there’s really nothing else but just to say it plainly. “Do you not want to have sex again?”

She’s glad he doesn’t have a cup of coffee, because he certainly would have spilled the whole damn thing again. His pale hair always makes his blushing face impressively red.

“I…um, I…” His gaze jerks to the corridor.

“You want more privacy?” Touka guesses. In her mind she imagines hauling their blanket to the most forsaken dark and chilly corner possible, which probably wouldn’t be worse than the old building anyway, but certainly it also wouldn’t be worth the general effort. There are plenty of times they are left alone here. Like now.

She thinks. “I could hang the blanket like a curtain?” she offers.

He grimaces. “No, it’s not…not that…”

Touka waits patiently for him to gather himself.

“I just don’t…want to bother you,” he manages, after an amount of effort that seems unreasonably enormous.

“Ah, right. I’d forgotten how busy it gets.” She leans back, gesturing implicitly to the magazines she’s memorized. The bare walls of her cell, which are too clean for her to bother cleaning any more.

He stares at the floor. “I just don’t want to bother you,” he repeats, in a mumble, and Touka watches him. Slowly, she frowns.

She knows so much about him. The taste of the coffee he makes, what books he read in Anteiku’s back room, his preferred eyepatch brand. His shitty ideals and how far he’ll go for them. The date-by-date trajectory of his dove career.

But…it’s true there was a Kaneki even before all that. One that, she realizes, she doesn’t know at all. The one that perhaps she would understand better, if she had met him before everything.

In the end, there’s really nothing else but just to say it plainly.

“Look here,” she says. For all his apprehension, he obliges quickly. She moves her face to his — close. But not close enough. His eyes drop to her mouth. He swallows. She says it slowly, for his benefit.

“You don’t bother me,” she whispers. “I want to. If you want to.”

Somehow, he turns even redder. “O-okay,” he says, just barely. Still, he doesn’t move, and she waits patiently, strokes his forearm encouragingly, and when he finally does lean in close enough to press his mouth to hers, it’s like they’ve never done it at all. He kisses her, as chaste as if it were their first kiss, and then he sucks in a breath, and kisses her again, as hungry as if he’d been desperate to for years. She’s so startled that she makes a noise and he quickly withdraws.

“Sorry,” he gasps. “I knew it — I was too — Touka-chan, I’m sorry, I didn’t actually want —”

“Stop,” she says firmly. Or at least as firmly as she can while still trying to catch her breath. She brushes her hair, with a slightly shaky hand. She shuts her eyes against an onslaught of dumb thoughts, things like  _oh_  and  _yes_  and  _more_  and  _Kaneki tastes so, so good_. She has a too-vivid memory of feeling his weight and heat roll the breath out of her and of being hungry not for oxygen but just for him to grip her even harder. She meets his gaze and before he looks away she sees, behind the film of shame, a flash of that same desire.

If this wasn’t the only shirt she owned now, she’d be asking him to rip it off. As it is. There’s really nothing else but just to say it plainly.

“Tell me,” she says.

“Tell…tell you?”

“Yeah. Tell me everything.” She feels too-warm, her heart is pounding so hard she feels almost queasy, but she perseveres. She strokes his other forearm, watches goosebumps roll up the flesh of his biceps.

“You didn’t want to bother me, right?” she murmurs. “What was it exactly that you didn’t want to annoy me with?”

“T-Touka-chan!” His laugh is both weak, and too-loud. But her hand is caressing his thigh now. And pointedly going no further.

He is straining. He’s breaking. It’ll probably take a while yet for her to coax completely whichever Kaneki she’s dealing with now, but she can start slowly. She stops herself from kissing his brow, from drawing him into her lap. She nuzzles his ear, holding out her hand, wanting him to grab her, to snatch her and swallow her up, to let himself do what he wants with her. But it begins with admitting it.

“Tell me, Kaneki.” She breathes. “Just say it plainly.”


	4. Second Time (Kakuhou) (Rated M)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another hc of their second time haha, i just don't want to post this as a separate story.
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: this chapter has a different rating than the rest of the stories!

The second time they do it is even better, though their coordination, initially, leaves just a little to be desired. Kaneki brings the blanket to where Touka sleeps, and Touka spreads it out on her cot and motions that he sit beside her, and they exchange a shy but heated glance before he swallows and hitches off his shirt.

It drops aside, with all the rest of their clothing. Touka sets her hand on Kaneki’s arm, on his bicep that immediately prickles up with goosebumps. She brushes her fingers gently lower, to the knitted, plated flesh that makes up his lower arm, and under her caress the dark red cells quiver and for an instant his fingers shiver and grip into a melty fist.

There’s not much more encouragement needed then, but Touka does it anyway, opening her mouth to invite his, letting him hear her sigh when he leans into her, rolling an arm around his body to pull him close and posing her fingers, again, unerringly, on a certain spot of his lower back that immediately makes him groan and ( _oh_ ) grind his hips into her. the cot squeaks. Kaneki whispers something, hoarsely.

“What?” Touka asks, and he repeats it, with some effort: “Turn…turn…turn around.”

She rotates beneath him, aided by his arm, which rolls her with a gruffness that makes her belly flutter, only slightly, not as much as it flutters when he sinks his bare hot weight against her back, and certainly not as much as it does when he sets his mouth to her right shoulder blade. All the hairs on her nape rise. She realizes what he’s doing only an instant before he manages to do it, and has no time at all to brace herself when his lips press against a certain spot on her back, a place that looks just like all the rest but instantly alights under his kiss.

She —  _whimpers_  — she can’t — help it. Kaneki stiffens when she does it, in more ways than one, but before he can ask her whether she’s fine she grabs his hand and grips it pleadingly, and there are no gazes passed between them this time; he understands her already, and kisses again, and again, once light and once deep, once with the flick of the tip of his tongue, once with a deep lap from the breadth of it, once even with a gentle suckle that draws out from her a helpless gasp of pleasure.

The feeling is exquisite, heady, almost paralyzing. The smallest motion resonates in flares and lights across her entire body and she might as well be another kagune of his, moldable to his every whim and will. Already she feels herself fitting in against the rhythm of his firm, slow bucking. Her hips raise against him and her legs part to admit the hand smoothing down against her belly, and lower, and she buckles, a bit, when his fingers press between, and inside, and stroke.

:::

“You’re wet, Touka-chan,” he murmurs.

“Gross,” she mutters back, and he falters.

“Oh — oh, n-no, that’s not — i meant, it’s — well, it’s kind of — that is, i kind of —”

“No,” she groans, “gross that you’re even  _saying_ something like that,” and she pushes her face into the cot to hide her reddening face when he says “Oh,” and pushes his fingers in, easily, deeper. She’s so hot inside. And so soft. And —

“So wet,” he repeats into her ear, and is rewarded by the creep of red all the way to both lobes.

It’s so much better, this time. To take more time to touch her, this time, to look at her, to study her reactions when he squeezes and teases her breasts and nipples, when his fingers spiral and nudge inside her, when he grazes her skin with his teeth and then, with a swelling heart, bites, and elicits from her a moan so full of hunger that neither of them care at who else might be listening. She pushes her hips against him again, with urgency, and when she cries “More,  _more_ ,” he fingers her even more earnestly, and takes, frankly, several liberties with just how long and thick that fingers should really be. He reshapes his hand inside her, filling her densely and then deeply, pushing in and out with luxury, sipping her tiny cries, watching her carefully for any hesitation, and feels breathless when she only yields and and yields and squirms and arches her back and continues to say it, “More, more,  _more_ , Kaneki,  _more_ ,” until finally she says, “Kaneki, listen, no,  _your cock_ ,” and he stammers, “Wh-what?” and she turns and fixes him with one eye and says it, so there can’t be any mistake to it: “ _Fuck me with your cock._ ”

He obeys her with a speed that startles even himself. He rearranges and braces and sinks in with a single hard thrust, gasping at the feel of her, exquisite, heady, almost paralyzing. The smallest clutch of her around him resonates in flares and lights across her entire body and he might as well be her kagune, effervescent, scintillating from her every plead and gasp. He overlaps her hands with his and kisses her shoulder blades with passion, nibbling and suckling until he’s left marks. Soon though the pressure builds, so much that he has to use all his energy to focus on thrusting, and then on not losing himself entirely, and when he begins to pant and slow Touka looks back at him with ruffled hair and dazed confusion and he gasps it, helplessly, “I’m — going to —” and she opens her soft mouth and tells him, “Come.”

“T — T-Touka-chan, I —”

“Come,” she repeats, “Ken, _come_ ,” and he groans and pushes and pushes, and melts.

:::

Afterward, he rolls her over again, so they can lay against each other, face to face. Her face is flushed and moist with sweat and he kisses her forehead and she smiles at him, very, faintly.

“No crying this time?” she asks. he considers.

“Maybe I will if you repeat what you said,” he murmurs. “At the…the end.”

“What,” she says, “‘come?’”

“N-no…before that.”

“‘Cock?’”

“Ah…no.”

“‘Fuck me,’” Touka tries, and Kaneki laughs, lightly. Alright. That’s fine.

“Nevermind,” he says. He smiles and lays down against her, and Touka wraps her arms around him. After a moment, she squeezes him, briefly.

“Goodnight, Ken.”


	5. Bite

After Touka tells Kaneki how ghouls marry, she isn’t expecting him to suddenly embrace her so firmly —

As if with intention — as if with real decision. It’s one thing for them to offer up their virginities. It’s another thing, somehow, for them to seriously undertake something like  _marriage_ , which even now still feels less like something she would do and something more like her parents would do. She recalls her father, standing at the sink, not washing dishes, but only staring into the distance while rubbing at the side of his neck for minutes at a time.

“So…” Kaneki clears his throat. “Anywhere?”

“Here,” she says. This time, she unbuttons her shirt before she peels it back, exposing the slope of her shoulder. Kaneki licks his lips, nervously. he leans in. Touka’s skin quivers, at the exhale of warm breath, and his teeth part, and close. She feels his canines worry, slightly, against her, as if testing where they might best enter. He repositions, to avoid a bone. Then, Kaneki, who stutters and blushes and scratches his head while laughing apprehensively — Kaneki, with a single motion — bites.

There’s a blur of pain. She sucks in a breath. Kaneki stiffens, but her hand reaches up, clutches his back.

“Harder,” she hisses, through her teeth. It needs to be deeper than what her cells can heal, deeper than what time can erase. She’s expecting to have to argue with him about it, but Kaneki closes his eyes, and nuzzles her, even more fiercely. This time, her body jerks, but he was expecting it: his arms tighten around her, holding her, one hand stroking her lower back. Blood wells in the corners of his mouth. It streams, hot, down her breast.

She exhales, shakily. Pain makes her mind race in a way not dissimilar to how it had when both of them were naked, when he had leaned over her and rested his calloused fingertips on her thighs to part them. At the time she had told him, “Y _ou don’t have to touch me so gently,”_ and sometimes she doesn’t always say exactly what she means, but it’s only now that she realizes that she is finally getting it, the thing she didn’t realize she was asking for: Kaneki, digging his nails into her skin. Kaneki, leaving her with something that nothing, not even her ghoul’s body, can separate her from.

Frankly, it’s over quickly. Kaneki licks his lips again, and can’t resist a kiss, and then wipes at her with his sleeve, applies pressure with his rough, but gentle, palm. Touka sets her own palm on top of it, with a deep breath. It’s throbbing. She feels lightheaded.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

She’s okay.

And married.

Almost.

“Thank goodness,” Kaneki says. he wipes his mouth. “Um…so. now you…do it to me next. Right?”

She eyes him as he carefully tugs down his collar. It looks pretty clumsy, given the breadth of what they’re doing. When he’s done, she touches him with a fingertip, as if to feel out a point of entry, when really she’s —

There it is. A thin thread of silver, the only thing that Rize’s kakuhou left of the gash she gave him in the chapel, when she’d swallowed hungrily, desperate for strength to protect them both. Once again, she opens her mouth. She bites, a little deeper, maybe, than completely necessary; and definitely for much longer. Her belly, which for weeks now has been her queasy enemy, betrays her again, this time by emitting a grumble. Kaneki rests his head against hers, softly. He doesn’t say a word until she pulls away herself, licking her lips, and sipping every drop.


	6. Bathing

Kaneki is rarely ever alone when he returns underground, except that one time that he came back like unexplainably covered in filth, at which point everyone she asked simply frowned and pointed Touka to the bathroom he was using to clean up.

That there’s areas for bathing at all underground is fortunate for the lot of them burrowed down here. (And probably more thanks to Tsukiyama’s maneuvering than anything else.) Touka follows a trail of muddy footsteps — a gray puddle pooling beneath clothing wrung out and hung to dry on a bowed wire — and then, finally, a door with light beneath, which she opens. There’s a flutter of water.

“— Touka-chan,” Kaneki realizes. He scrambles to cover himself up, and then stops, grimacing.

“Welcome back,” Touka tells him.

“Yeah…I’m back.” he smiles. “Hello.”

“Want some help?” she asks, and Kaneki blinks at her. He seems confused.

“No, I don’t need…” he starts, and then he trails off.

“Okay,” he says, quietly.

She sets her shoes and socks outside the door, hangs up her cardigan and pants, rolls up her sleeves, stands beside him as he sits on a small stool on the floor, beside the tub. Bath or not, the hot water is limited. They fill up pails of cold from a spigot, which she pours over his body after scrubbing him until the suds run brown. He endures with shudders and coughs. She helps him get at the parts he can’t quite easily reach, though after a while it’s clear that maybe he can reach them and he’s just letting her scrub the muscles of his back with soap-slick palms because it’s a little obvious he is mostly clean there already and her fingers are moving just a little too slowly to actually be scrubbing. He leans back against her, a little.

“Nore,” Touka tells him, holding out a hand, and Kaneki pumps shampoo into it from a nearby dispenser, and she whisks it into his hair. It turns frothy immediately. It smells nice. (Tsukiyama, again.) She combs through it and massages him for a long time, dislodging the grit she can feel against his scalp. When she pours the water on him, his hair is white again.

“All clean,” Touka announces.

For a moment Kaneki is silent. Then he says, “Thank you,” slowly. He swallows and turns to look up at her. “Touka-chan, thank you so —”

“Yeah,” Touka says. “Let’s use the hot water now.”

“…what?”

“Come on,” she says, already siphoning hot water out into the tub, already unbuttoning her shirt and stepping out of her underwear. “I haven’t had a good bath in forever.”

Much less any time alone with him, but, that’s way too mushy to say. She fills up another pail with cold water, which she uses this time to douse herself. She curses and quickly gets into the tub, which is a quarter full and emitting steam. She sits, shivering, brushing back her hair, watching him.

He considers. Then he steps over, and in.

The tub isn’t quite large enough for the two of them. Fitting their limbs in as the water rises is a puzzle, and Touka waits for Kaneki to exhaust his attempts at modesty. Finally he wraps his arms around her middle and draws her back to his chest. He leans back and she leans back against him too, curling up. They realize their error when the spigot is too far for either of them to reach with their hands without displacing the sloshing water, but Kaneki shifts, and the spigot squeaks when his kagune shuts it off.

It’s quiet. water drips, somewhere, and makes a crinkling noise as they adjust. They breathe.

Beneath her, she feels Kaneki slowly, steadily, relax. He sighs, and his muscles loosen. His hands, which are strangely stiff around her midsection, uncurl, a little, resting lightly against her belly. After a moment he presses his mouth to the side of her head and kisses her, and Touka pushes back against him more, fitting her head better against him, and he understands, and kisses her again, this time squeezing her happily.

“I finished all the books you brought,” Touka says.

“You — did? all of them?”

“Yeah,” Touka says. “So next time, bring me some more. maybe the next time you’re not planning on swimming through a sewer before coming back.”

“Ah — sure — of course. of course. I’d be…really happy to.” He is squeezing her again. He pauses, and then asks, shyly, “Which one did you like the best?”


	7. Dragon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my hc of what happened underground when kaneki turned!

In those last moments, what she wanted most was to close her eyes, to not see the blades sinking into every part of her. Thoughts occur like, W _hat comes after can’t be as bad as this_ , and, just as was always rumored by books and movies and luckier ghouls, her life begins to flash: the broken bones, the cold nights, the hungry churn of her stomach which, presently, her fingers grip against, as if her hand could be a shelter between starvation and child.

_You’ll never feel it, at least,_  she thinks, as boots march closer. No belly furious with a best friend’s home-cooked meal, no fingers tender with a novice’s spilled coffee. No sharp jabs from someone who knows you too well. No knotted throat at the sight of a familiar face in a cafe. Her vision blurs, and blurs again when she wipes it, but still, it seems a shame, to fight for this long, and to not see the end.

This is what death feels like:

Darkness, first. Or maybe the loudness happens first. Both are so powerful her chest shies, shrinks, wilts. Death is a hundred screams writhing into a single, horrible shriek, so high and long that she can’t tell when they all collapse into ringing, deafening silence. Death is noiseless and sightless but it allows her her mouth and when she shuts it, she tastes both sweetness and appalling bitterness. She trembles.

Death is wet. She is drenched, heavy with death that is dripping into her ears and nostrils. Death is hot, like a body…a hundred bodies. And then death is cold, and congealing on her lips, mudding her hair, squelching between the soles of her shoes and the arches of her feet as she staggers forward.

She starts to tremble, first from the wetness that is cold and growing colder; and then, from the presence she can sense as the solid humming in her ears begins to recede and reveals a not-too-distant slither, a too-near wicker. She spits, and swallows, and spits and swallows again, until she muscles down the bitter taste and the sweet taste and the teeth-chisel grit of jagged dust. Her hand shakes as she reaches into the dark, and feels hard, smooth chitin. It rises against her touch and when she jerks, leaps, stumbles, and collapses back, it follows. It caresses her again, gently.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!!


End file.
